Have you ever fallen head over heels in love with a thing? Not a person, but a thing, or an activity, or maybe a place, and that love changed everything about how you live?

That happened to me. A couple of times, actually. Once for the worse, but also once for the better. And I’m going to tell you about the latter.

Our passions can sometimes arrive in unexpected ways. There are some folks, like my second daughter, who love a thing out of the gate and it evolves into a lifelong passion. My daughter’s name is Maryam and she likes cats, she always has, and I suspect she always will.

But then there are others, like myself, who are perfectly content with life until something comes along that changes our course forever. We’ll have an experience, a connection that sets us on a new and exciting path. And with each taste of that thing, we only want more.

And that’s how it was with my first camping trip in the summer of 1995.

When it comes to the outdoors, I’m a late bloomer. I didn’t grow up camping or fishing. There was nobody to take me hiking and when I first discovered the lemony taste of sourgrass outside as a child, I was told to keep away from it, “because that’s where dogs pee.”

That’s what I was told. I didn’t have parents who were afraid of nature. It just wasn’t a priority. And to the extent that it was not a priority, I had to be warned away from nature because they had not put in the time to help me navigate the natural world with intelligence. My mother grew up in the city and, although my father grew up dirt poor in the hills of Kentucky and had a few early childhood memories of slopping hogs and catching snapping turtles, that was a long time ago, and by the time I came along freezing outside and trying to catch our food was not the experience he wanted me to have.

So I was 21 before I went camping for the very first time. And the whole adventure started around a pool table in southern California just a few months before.

My brother and I were shooting pool at Rick’s place. That’s where we spent most weekend nights. Rick had a rec room with a computer and all the latest video games, an enormous big-screen TV with surround sound, there was the pool table, and even a dart board. We would shoot pool for awhile, and then put on a movie, play some video games, throw some darts, and then just start the whole cycle all over again, the whole time burning through his parents’ supply of soda and snacks. These were very good times with lots of laughter and no shortage of conversation.

Then one night, the talk turned to Rick’s father. We never, ever saw him with a shirt on and he rarely smiled, but in his own way he seemed to enjoy the ruckus that we would get up to at his house. Rick told us that his dad had just bought a used van, “He says he’s going to fix it up for road trips. He said I could use it once he had it going.”

Now that shifted conversation in a big way. A road trip! If Rick could use the van, did that mean we could go along?

He said that’s exactly what it meant. Oh man. Where would we go? How far could we travel? How long could we get away? Summer was coming, nobody had classes scheduled, and this sounded suddenly, amazingly possible!

“Yeah,” Rick said, “Well, he just needs to fix up the van and we can figure out the rest.”

“No way,” I told Rick. “We’re going to figure this out tonight!”

He had a US map folded up on a table. I picked it up and I tacked it to the wall.

“Darts. We’re going to throw a dart. Wherever it hits, that’s where we’re headed.”

I can’t remember who actually threw the dart. But it hit a town called Aberdeen in South Dakota.

“That’s it. We’re going to Aberdeen!”

The dart had decided our summer plans.

Well, his dad did get that van fixed up. He took it on a few short runs before declaring that it was more than road-trip worthy. And it was a great van. It wasn’t much to look at. A faded brown color is what I remember but there was plenty of room and even a couple of homey fixtures like a small fridge and a countertop that made it feel almost like a mini RV. And we were beyond excited.

Back then I was working part-time at the college library and one day I was putting new books out on the shelves. One of the books was the latest Rand McNally Road Atlas and on the cover was the most beautiful picture of a snow-capped mountain reflected in a crystalline lake with jubilant wildflowers growing all along the banks. I opened up the atlas and learned that this was Mount Shuksan located in the North Cascades along the border between Washington and Canada.

Man. THAT’s where I wanted to go for my first road trip. I absolutely did NOT want to go to South Dakota anymore, but that dart hit Aberdeen and that was my idea so this was a dilemma.

But that Rand McNally Road Atlas turned out to be my saving grace, because right there on the map, not too far away from Mount Shuksan was a town called . . . ABERDEEN. And this was the 90s, remember, and the Aberdeen in Washington also turned out to be Kurt Cobain’s home town and THAT was the information I needed to reroute our first ever summer road trip.

I’m going to skip a lot here, partly because I don’t remember but mostly because I want to get to the camping part. Convincing the guys that we should switch our summer itinerary to a coastal trip, that was not a hard sell.

Everybody was super pumped. There would be four of us: me, my brother, Rick, and another friend, Andy.

I don’t remember much about packing. None of us had really done anything like this before and we had to get some things together. Somehow I got my hands on a sleeping bag and we found a tent. I brought my guitar and lots of pots and pans. I had some clothes for camping, but also nicer things for the nights we would spend in San Franciso, Portland, and Seattle. We could cross the border even. Maybe spend a night or two in Vancouver.

There was so much to think on and prepare for, but so much more to be excited about. The big day came and we loaded up the van, turned up the music, and got on interstate 5 headed north.

I remember the hills of San Franciso and the green trees of Portland. Oddly, I don’t remember spending the night in either of these places and it’s quite possible that we explored during the day and just took turns sleeping and driving through the night. We were college students with barely enough money for gas and food, so I can’t imagine there was anything left over for hotels.

After three days or so, we had gotten into Washington state and took highway 12 west to Aberdeen. It was nighttime when we arrived. It’s a logging town. I remember we found a Denny’s, or it was some kind of all-night diner and we had a bite, mostly so we could get a receipt confirming that we’d made good on our promise to travel to Aberdeen.

And after that, it was off to the North Cascades.

I wish I could remember where exactly we camped, but I really have no recollection. We took the van to the trailhead and we parked. This was going to be a backpacking trip, sort of. I mean, we didn’t have proper backpacks, but we had our school bags and lots of bungee cords that I remember using to secure all of my pots and pans to the outside of my pack. I didn’t have hiking shoes, but I had some old steel-toed army-surplus combat boots from my punk rock days that I figured would be fine on the trail. I think we had maybe five miles before we would get to our campsite.

It was a very noisy, very painful five miles. My pots and pans bounced and clanged with every step. My boots were painfully stiff and I could feel my feet being chewed up as we climbed the relentless switchbacks.

At one point a deer stepped onto the trail and we froze, careful not to disturb the woodland magic that granted us the vision of this rare and fleeting animal. But it just got super tense and boring just standing there and so one of the guys was eating a granola bar and he broke off a piece and threw it just in front of the deer who stooped to sniff and then eventually eat the granola. And the deer never left us after that.

Mile after mile, the deer followed until we eventually made camp. But the deer still wouldn’t go away which was starting to be a concern because we knew that the deer wanted our granola. So we started shushing it and throwing things at it and charging it. It would run off, only to come back a few minutes later. Somebody mentioned rabies and that was terrible because now we had to deal with the possibility of a rabid, granola-obsessed deer and none of us had ever heard of such a thing, but this was also our first time camping so maybe this is just the kind of thing that happens to people in the woods.

Rick decided he would make traps for the deer or anything else that wanted our granola so he started bending little trees all over the place with a plan to tie them down in some way that would cause them to snap up and snare big game. Except he had no idea how to actually do this and it sounded like he broke half the forest even trying.

In making camp, it became suddenly obvious that we didn’t have enough water for anything. Not for drinking or cooking or washing. We had pretty well polished off the water in our canteens, but we were on an overlook and way out I could see a lake and that was the beginning of my plan to save our lives.

I had one of those 30 gallon garbage bags folded up in my pack. I gave it to my brother and told him to fill it with water at the lake and to bring it back. He took Andy and the two of them set out. And Rick just kept making his traps.

Some hours later, the two of them came hiking up the hill, absolutely exhausted, an enormous black balloon of a bag between them and water sloshing everywhere with every grunting step. They were absolute heroes, and none to early as the sun was starting to set.

They got the bag into camp and we figured out a way to tie the open ends of the bag to a tree to keep it sort of standing up and I dipped a pot into the water.

The water was filled with dirt and leaves and debris. It would need some work, but the lives of my brother and friends were, I felt, in my hands.

So I took off my boots and peeled my bloodied socks off my blistered feet. Andy watched in total horror as I poured the water through my socks to filter out all the debris. I was so proud of my work.

There was still some sediment, but not nearly as much, and I put the pot of mostly clear water on a camp stove to boil.

And once boiled, I let the water cool a bit before I poured it into another garbage bag that I had secured to a different tree and I went like that for awhile: filtering the lake water through my socks into a pot, getting that to a rolling boil, letting it cool, and then pouring it all into a second garbage bag. Once I had done a few gallons, I tossed a handful of iodine tablets into the collected and purified water for good measure.

Andy wouldn’t drink it. Not that night and not even the next day. The rest of us did and it was pretty funky, probably more from the iodine than my socks.

I don’t remember the stars or the sunrise. I don’t remember how or if we ever got rid of that deer. And I have no recollection of the weather or what we ate.

But I will never forget Andy choosing dehydration over boiled sock-water.

And I’ve been in love with the outdoors ever since.

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